The Midnight Witch (22 page)

They catch up to the others and soon arrive at a weathered door, which is protected from the elements by a dozen layers of thick brown paint, its brass hand plate worn to a thin sliver of metal. The door creaks as Perry pushes it open, and the four of them step inside.

The Soldiers’ Arms, in common with many public houses in the city, has been built to accommodate as many drinkers as possible, and what comforts there are exist to encourage the patrons to linger, and to socialize if they will, while not getting in the way of the serious business of imbibing alcoholic beverages. The floor is of broad wooden boards, at least, which is an improvement on some of the compacted earth and flagstones favored in other establishments. A scattering of fresh sawdust upon the floorboards suggests some small effort has been made toward cleanliness, though it will soon be crushed beneath so many wet and dirty boots as to render it ineffectual. Against the far wall there is a high bar, polished by the sleeves of the faithful over years. Gleaming pewter tankards, stout china pots, and chunky glasses are lined up on the shelves behind it. There are casks of ale, flagons of cider, and bottles of harsh red wine on display. On an upper shelf sit gin, rum, brandy, and whiskey. There are twists of tobacco for sale, as well as a humble but serviceable snuff. It is a quiet hour, so that the space is not uncomfortably crowded, and the voices of those present create a low mumbling, rather than the raucous shouts and laughter that might be heard in the evenings.

Bram leads his guests over to the wide fireplace and sees them seated on the shabby but inviting settle, with its treacly black wood and faded tapestry cushions. He goes to the bar with Perry and whispers urgently in his ear.

“Have you any money on you?”

“My dear fellow,” Perry looks stricken, “I assumed you were in funds.”

“Why would you think that? I haven’t sold a painting since I arrived and I’ve used up nearly all the money I brought with me. I gave Jane two pounds for housekeeping only yesterday.” Bram narrows his eyes at Perry’s expensive coat. “Have you no savings at all? Nothing, perhaps, sent from home?”

“My parents, alas, do not approve of my chosen path in life. They will not support me in it. I make what I can from selling my sketches, but lately I have been so busy helping Mangan I’ve produced precious little work of my own. And now he is ill, well, it is difficult to paint, sculpt, or even draw when the house is in such uproar.”

Bram cannot argue with this. And he knows only too well how hard it is to scrape a living together. He digs deep in his pockets. Perry does the same. Their search yields the royal sum of three shillings and sixpence.

“Well,” Bram does a quick calculation, “we can afford one brandy for each of us here, and a small bottle to take home to Mangan.”

“One drink only?” Perry sighs. “What a pity not to be able to spend longer in such delightful company,” he adds, looking wistfully in the direction of Charlotte.

“Can’t be helped,” says Bram, ordering the drinks from the aproned barman. “We’ll just have to make the best of it.”

They rejoin their companions, who have undone their coats but, sensibly, given the patchy heat supplied by the fire, elected to keep them on. Perry sits as close to Charlotte as good manners will allow and engages her in a discussion about the dancer, Isadora Duncan, who has recently taken Paris society by storm. Bram takes the low wooden chair opposite Lilith, setting the drinks down on the small table between them. He uses the opportunity to study her fine profile as she turns to watch the leaping flames of the burning coals in the hearth.

“How I long to paint you.” The words are out of his mouth before he has had time to consider the wisdom of speaking them aloud. The statement sounds far more personal, more revealing of himself than it should be, somehow. Lilith looks at him thoughtfully.

“How would you depict me?” she asks. “As Mr. Mangan has chosen to portray Charlotte—a Grecian goddess, perhaps?”

“Good Lord, no!” The gulp of brandy is already dissolving his reserve.

“Oh? Don’t you like the way he is sculpting her?”

“I’m sure he will produce a perfectly stunning piece of work, in his singular way, of how he sees her. But such a pose, such a style, well…”

“It is not
your
style.”

He shakes its head. “Nor would it suit you.”

“Oh? Please tell me, what do you consider would suit me? How is it that you see me?”

He hesitates, uncertain still as to how much he should speak what is in his heart. How much of himself, and of his regard for her, he should reveal. But then the images he carries in his mind of how he would paint her, of how he imagines he could immortalize her, these images are so vivid he cannot resist attempting to share them with her.

“I would have you sit in a darkened room, the light source only from one place. Strong, but partial, so that it would fall across your face were it turned to the side…” He shakes his head and snatches off his hat, frustrated at his efforts to be clear, to make her see what he sees. His hair falls into his eyes and he pushes it back with a paint-stained hand. “The contrast should be heightened. A limited palette—browns, blacks, creams only. That way your eyes, well, they would shine with their own luminosity. As they do in life.” He becomes more animated, gesticulating with his hands as he speaks. “Your hair loose, of course, dark against your skin … not a nude, nothing like that, but bare shoulders, certainly. Pale. Very pale. Again the contrast, do you see? Do you see, Lilith?” He pauses, and then asks again, more quietly, reaching across the table to take her hands in his. “Do you see?” The sensation of her warm gloved fingers in his palms is easily as intoxicating to him as the brandy. He wants to keep this fragile connection. Slowly he lifts her hands and presses them to his lips, turning them over to kiss the soft, white-blue flesh of the underside of her wrists, the slender gap that he can just glimpse between the end of her leather gloves and the fur cuffs of her coat. She gives no answer to his question, but puts her head a little on one side as she watches him, and does not resist when he continues to clasp her hands in his own.

Perry is recounting an anecdote about Mangan letting a model get frostbite because she was made to sit for so long unclothed in his unheated studio. Charlotte laughs a little too brightly, and then calls for more brandy. Bram cannot bear the thought of their time together coming to an end so soon, so he simply lets Perry pour them each another measure from the pathetically small bottle that was intended for Mangan. He looks up at her and finds her staring back at him. He wishes more than anything that they could be alone together, for he knows she will not speak to him in the way she began to in the garden the other night so long as there are other people to hear what she has to say.

Whether or not she is aware of the extent of his inner turmoil he cannot tell, but he is certain she senses something of it. At last she casts her eyes down and, slowly, reluctantly, he likes to believe, withdraws her hands, setting them demurely in her lap. Charlotte and Perry are laughing loudly at a shared joke.

Lilith stands and begins to button her coat. “I am sorry to break up the party,” she says with somewhat forced cheerfulness, “but I really think Charlotte and I should be going.” She glances around the room which is now filling with more boisterous drinkers.

Bram leaps to his feet, his chair scraping the floorboards as he does so.

“Of course,” he says. “We shall find you a cab.”

Charlotte and Perry both protest, but follow nonetheless as Lilith takes Bram’s arm once more. Outside the weather has worsened, so that the icy blast that blows down Cleveland Street seems to carry in it splinters of ice. They cast about for a hansom or a motor cab, but all that pass are already occupied. Perry and Charlotte, fueled by the coarse brandy, wave and whistle madly in the hope of summoning some sort of transport. Bram stands at the curb with Lilith. Neither of them speaks, and there is a palpable tension between them now. The bleak, gray light of the winter afternoon perfectly matches Bram’s mood, for he can see no possible way of improving his standing in Lilith’s eyes. She is the daughter of a duke, fabulously wealthy, and beautiful, and could have the pick of all the eligible men in the country. He is the son of a modestly successful steel magnate, with less than a shilling of his own, and a chosen career that might see them both starve.

“Hey!” yells Perry. “We’ve found one!” He signals wildly to indicate the carriage pulling to a halt a little farther up the street.

“Come along, Lily!” Charlotte calls as she runs after it.

Lilith turns to Bram to say good-bye and, to the astonishment of both of them, he swiftly takes her in his arms, pulls her to him, and kisses her hard, full on the lips. She pulls away, but he holds her tight, so that her face remains only inches from his own. As the wind buffets them and tugs at their clothes, and passersby exclaim or laugh, and Charlotte squeals in amazement, and a motorist blasts his horn, and a nag whinnies, and the shouts of a chestnut seller sing out above it all, Bram falls deep into Lilith’s fathomless gaze and hears himself murmur her name, over and over, like a prayer. A prayer that she will not disappear out of his life. A prayer that she will return his passion. A prayer that she knows. That she understands. That she, too, wants what he wants.

“Don’t go,” he says at last.

“I must,” she whispers, her own voice unsteady. “I must.”

Bram kisses her again, more tenderly this time, but still with unmistakable fervor. When he finally lets her go, she turns without a word and runs to the waiting cab. He watches Perry shut the door and the driver urge the bony horse into a trot as the carriage bears Lilith away. Away down the street. Away from that incomparable moment. Away from him. But as he watches a smile plays across his face and glee wells up inside him, for Bram knows, he is certain beyond the trace of a doubt, that while he held her, while he kissed her sweet mouth, she kissed him back.

12.

If to be in love is to lose one’s self then I am as in love as it is possible to be, for I am utterly lost! My head is filled with thoughts of him, of the man who has so unexpectedly yet so completely claimed my heart. When I close my eyes I see him. When I dream it is of him. When I try to read a novel the words shift upon the page until they spell out his name. I am like a giddy girl, unable to be still or serious for a minute, flitting from one imagining to the next, all of him. Of us. Could there ever, truly, be an “us”? The thought is thrilling, and yet it casts me down also. For in what world do I see a future for us together? Am I to move into the Mangan household, become bohemian, live in chilly, hungry freedom, and break my mother’s heart forever? Is Bram to join me as my husband in some corner of Fitzroy Square, without purpose or title or means, humiliated by living off my inheritance, and ill at ease among the society into which he would inevitably be thrust? Both alternatives are inconceivable. I should be despairing, and yet I find that I am not. The delicious, the intoxicating state of being in love is too glorious to be squashed by such prosaic obstacles. That I can have been so quickly transported to this disturbing condition still amazes me. I have tried, these past few days, to pinpoint the moment when it happened. The instant when my view of the world shifted. Charlotte believes it occurred when Bram kissed me. She spoke of nothing else all the way home in the cab that day, and of course there has been no hiding my feelings from her. I may be expert at keeping secrets as a witch, but this is different. This business of love is new to me, and though Charlotte herself claims neither experience nor expertise, it is good to share it. I am glad she was there to see what happened. Indeed, if I did not have her to share my feelings with I believe I should go mad.

But I think she is wrong about my moment of transformation. By the time Bram held me to him and showed me what was in his heart, mine was already lost to him. Only I had not acknowledged the fact, even to myself. I had not dared do so.

And yet, above all this joy, the Dark Spirit is never far from my thoughts. As always, personal desires must defer to coven matters. Aside from the visitations, there is something else that twists my mind into knots of doubt and confusion. Who was it who challenged me at the inauguration? And why? I believe the two things must surely be connected. To have two threats against the coven at the same time cannot be coincidence. I had thought the challenge to be of lesser importance than perhaps it truly is. Taken with the actions of the Dark Spirit I have to look at it anew, have to question the motives behind it.

It is my search for answers to these questions that finds me heading for the shabby house in Bloomsbury while the rest of the world slumbers. I have slipped away alone, unseen. I need a confidante. Someone who might help me make sense of what has happened. Someone I trust utterly.

The carriage arrives at my destination. I alight onto the pavement and the driver, whose discretion is beyond question, flicks the reins quietly, moving away to wait in the shadows. It would not do for curious eyes, however unlikely, to notice the Montgomery carriage parked outside the house of a disreputable bohemian artist in the small hours of the night. I do not knock, but open the door which has been left unlocked so that I may make my entry as quickly and quietly as possible. I have visited the house on a number of occasions, always in darkness, and so have become adept at navigating the flotsam and jetsam of the hallway as we thread through the gloom to the studio at the rear of the building. Mangan is waiting for me.

“Ah!” He takes an unlit pipe from his mouth and holds out his hand in greeting. “The splendid, shining Morningstar. Welcome! Welcome.” He grasps my hand in his and does not so much shake as squeeze it warmly. During our meetings I feel I have come to know the outlandish sculptor quite well, and I am aware of how much he has to dampen his natural ebullience and indeed volume if he is not to wake the whole household. He bids me be seated, clearing a space on a dusty chaise. The only light in the room comes from two short candles, and the gray wash of the city night with its blurring streetlamps diffused through the glass roof and frontage. It is not so much illumination as a subtle lessening of the blackness.